Tools And Techniques For Enhanced Project Management And Self-managed Teams In Ecological Wastewater Solutions Pty Ltd Essay.

The EWS leadership team recognizes the need to establish a number of project teams in order to achieve the above goals. You and your group are responsible for developing a Project Human Resource Plan that will develop a formal plan for developing, staffing, managing and assessing the teams that will in turn manage the projects aimed at addressing the goals. The plan will include the following:

1. A draft organisational chart for the project teams: Which of the functional roles will be represented on each of these project teams?

2. A staffing/recruitment plan: What strategies and approaches will you use to bring the appropriate individuals onto these project teams?

3. A team building plan: What strategies and approaches will you use to effectively build a team that will work together in a project management approach to achieve each of the goals?

4. A staff management plan: What strategies and approaches will you use to manage the project teams?

5. A communications plan: What strategies and approaches will you use to effectively manage communications among (and, if necessary between) each project team? Assume some stakeholders are remote.

6. An assessment plan: What strategies and approaches will be used to assess the effectiveness of each project team?

7. An improvement plan: Describe the improvement plan proposed to address any shortcomings in the performance of the project teams.
 

Project Management may be stated as the technique of planning, initiating, controlling, executing and finishing the work with the help of an organized team and meet the specified goals within the stipulated time (Kerzner & Kerzner, 2017). The project management is encircled with many goals and objectives too (Heagney, 2016). There are many vulnerabilities regarding the management of project, which needs to be reduced to provide an effective way to achieve the goals.

In this assignment, the chosen organization to work with is taken as Ecological Wastewater Solutions Pty Ltd (EWS). The organization deals with eco-friendly management system of wastewater for the treatment of sewage (Grizzetti et al., 2016). This organization is now looking forward towards the growing and in the expansion of the process that they are up-to.

This purpose of the report is to deal with the tools and techniques that are to be used for an enhanced project management (Project Management Institute, 2017a). This assignment also states the five powers that should be implemented to provide motivation towards the employees for an enhanced productivity rate.

Leadership Style refers as the approach and manner of providing a direction, implementation of plans and providing motivation to people working in an organisation. From an employee perspective, it can be said as the specific pattern of implicit as well as explicit actions that are performed by their leader (Holten & Brenner, 2015). There are different project management styles in EWS that are described below:

Authoritative: A leader falls in this group of leadership style who has a clear vision of its goals and maintains a happy profile to share the vision with his entire team. This enhances the encouragement of the staff to collaborate for the completion of the project (Zhang et al., 2015). An authoritative leader has the knowledge of the whole project.

Coercive: Many leaders work with small and junior teams, who uses this type of style. The team members often views this style as dictatorship (Landa & Tyson, 2017). However, the managers concern about the education and providing knowledge to the junior employees to drive the project’s completion.

Democratic: A leader falls under this leadership style when the leader does not focuses on leading the project or providing a guidance to the employees to complete the project (Amanchukwu, Stanley & Ololube, 2015). This lack of managerial capability lengthens the project delivery time and demotivates the morale of the employees to work efficiently.

Leadership styles and their importance

One for all and All for one: The leaders falling under this category is said to follow the management styles that are likely to fulfil all the aspirations of the employees as well as of the organization (Antonakis & Day, 2017).

Selection of one leadership style: In case of EWS, the one for all and all for one leadership quality is to be chosen to enhance the employee’s encouragement to build up a good quality service towards the wastewater management project. The managers should provide education and training to its employees so that they can run the project in a more advanced way and perform accordingly to get achieve the organization’s goals. As the leaders falling into this category have the full knowledge of the project this leadership style will be the best implemented style of the other styles as stated above. So these type of leaders can give an enhanced progress of the goals of EWS. This type of leaders can handle any critical solutions arising in the EWS. Hence this leadership style will be very beneficial for the Organization.

The tools and techniques that can be used to enhance the progress of the EWS project team are discussed below.

In case of influencing the EWS project teams, the utilization of charts are helpful as they can be said as graphical representations, which explains the level of authorities as well as the reporting manager’s matrix. These charts easily provide a clear view to the employees about the management plan which that is followed in the organization (Milosevic & Martinelli, 2016). These will help the project delivery to be faster as the work distributed throughout the organizational structure is clearly stated in the form of the organizational chart.

The matrix is an important technique that is often used by any organization and is mainly known as responsibility assignments matrix. This implementation of this matrix at EWS will give a proper display of all the work packages that is to be delivered.

This technique of networking is the most important tool that are used to influence a project team. This defines that all the organizational employees, the leaders as well as the managers should be well connected to each other which will help the organisational leaders to maintain the transmission of the information regarding the update of the project in a regular basis (Remington & Pollack, 2016). The communication between the leaders and the employees is very necessary in accordance for the progress of the project.

Selection of one leadership style

The managers of EWS should have an expertise in judging, and making decisions when risks are identified in the execution of the project. Identifying the risks and vulnerabilities in the project, staff retention as well as release plans are some of the qualities that should be present in a manager (Project Management Institute, 2017b). This will provide quality as well as timely decisions to all the risks arising in the project.

In case of EWS, holding meetings between the members and project manager can be an effective way of putting influence in the team. The regular commencement of meetings will help the managers to keep a regular track of the project and through these meetings they can provide the decisions that are to be taken to enhance a project’s progress.

For motivating the team members of EWS towards the efficient execution of the project there are five forces that are incorporated by the managers (Levi, 2015). These are

The legitimate power enables a project manager to state his decisions that is to be taken for the progress of the project which can be very helpful for the EWS.

The reward power helps the managers to identify and reward those employees who worked hard for the organisation and increase the work comfort so that the employee can perform better. This will be very helpful for the employees of EWS.

The expert power of EWS characterizes the ability for the administration of the information, expertise and knowledge to other employees.

As EWS is initiating a new project, there should be a critical review of the employees predefined needs as well as execution plans. If the employees fails to achieve the goals set by the EWS then the managers should take initiative to stop this by motivating the employees at EWS.

Self-managed teams are a necessary part in the agile project management (Annosi et al., 2017). This self-managed teams can be developed using the following methodologies.

Shared leadership:  In case of efficient project execution, every manager should be shared with equally efficient team members that will make every team a balance one and performance will be equal from each and every team.

Team orientation: The orientation of teams should be in such terms that they could cope with the upcoming risks themselves. This will help the risks to be overcome in minimum time and increase the productivity factors of EWS.

Learning: If the self-managed teams of EWS are provided with proper learning and education then the employees could handle the risk events in a proper manner which will be helpful to the organization.

Tools and techniques for enhanced project management in EWS

Autonomy: The self-managed teams should have the autonomous work culture among them which will enhance the performance of the team as well as of the organization.

These above stated approaches are taken into consideration by EWS to create self-managed teams as these will help the progress of the organization’s success and make the organization different from its competitors (Inayat, 2015). These strategies are taken by the leaders of the organization to develop the self-managed teams and aim to achieve the company’s goals.

There are certain challenges that the managers of a project face while dealing project management. The project managers should be quite capable of identifying these risks and prevention measures should be taken by them to alleviate the challenges (Morrison et al., 2019). These are explained below:

• The managers should clearly specify the team members about the responsibilities of the part of the project that they are handling so that they could own the project and work efficiently.
• The managers should ensure that the key personnel should not pull off the project at crucial times either on a temporary basis or permanent basis as this will hamper the project’s success.
• The team members should be kept updated with the deadlines of their part which in future will meet the deadline of the whole project.
• The managers should have the potential of gathering all the requirements that are necessary for the fulfilment of the project.
• The manager should take every single problem as a serious one so that it does not goes to a higher level where the solution will be hard to implement.
• Management, collaboration and communication among the team members as well as with the managers are very necessary to avoid any vulnerabilities arising in the project (Muller, 2017).

Conclusion

Thus from above discussion it can be stated that EWS should follow the necessary steps to choose good team manager. The tools and techniques mentioned above should be taken into consideration by the whole managerial team of EWS to put up an effective success to the project they are handling. Moreover, the 5 types of power that are stated above to motivate the employees, can enhance the work culture of the EWS to maintain the success of the organisation. The creation of self-managed teams can put a positive impact on the project’s success. Finally the steps that are to be kept in mind by a project leader is also stated in the above work which will help the managers to detect the risks in the project beforehand, so that they can provide the solutions to any upcoming risks.

Thus it can be concluded that with the help of the above stated points EWS will be capable of maintaining a strong team for the project and a strong team leader who will lead these team members to carry out an effective and successful project in the organization.

References

Amanchukwu, R. N., Stanley, G. J., & Ololube, N. P. (2015). A review of leadership theories, principles and styles and their relevance to educational management. Management, 5(1), 6-14.

Annosi, M. C., Foss, N., Brunetta, F., & Magnusson, M. (2017). The interaction of control systems and stakeholder networks in shaping the identities of self-managed teams. Organization Studies, 38(5), 619-645.

Antonakis, J., & Day, D. V. (Eds.). (2017). The nature of leadership. Sage publications.

Grizzetti, B., Lanzanova, D., Liquete, C., Reynaud, A., & Cardoso, A. C. (2016). Assessing water ecosystem services for water resource management. Environmental Science & Policy, 61, 194-203.

Heagney, J. (2016). Fundamentals of project management. Amacom.

Holten, A. L., & Brenner, S. O. (2015). Leadership style and the process of organizational change. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 36(1), 2-16.

Inayat, I., Salim, S. S., Marczak, S., Daneva, M., & Shamshirband, S. (2015). A systematic literature review on agile requirements engineering practices and challenges. Computers in human behavior, 51, 915-929.

Kerzner, H., & Kerzner, H. R. (2017). Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.

Landa, D., & Tyson, S. A. (2017). Coercive Leadership. American Journal of Political Science, 61(3), 559-574.

Levi, D. (2015). Group dynamics for teams. Sage Publications.

Milosevic, D. Z., & Martinelli, R. J. (2016). Project management toolbox: tools and techniques for the practicing project manager. John Wiley & Sons.

Morrison, G. R., Ross, S. J., Morrison, J. R., & Kalman, H. K. (2019). Designing effective instruction. Wiley.

Muller, R. (2017). Project governance. Routledge.

Project Management Institute. (2017a). A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK guide). (6th ed.). Newton Square, PA: Project Management Institute.

 Project Management Institute. (2017b). Project manager competency framework. (3rd ed.). Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute.

Remington, K., & Pollack, J. (2016). Tools for complex projects. Routledge.

Zhang, J., Ahammad, M. F., Tarba, S., Cooper, C. L., Glaister, K. W., & Wang, J. (2015). The effect of leadership style on talent retention during merger and acquisition integration: Evidence from China. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 26(7), 1021-1050.